I'm just embedding some fonts in an epub as a test but I'm having issues with Wingding and Webding fonts displaying properly. I've chucked in some standard Roman fonts and they display fine in Sigil and when testing the book on a Sony ereader. However, the symbol fonts show up fine in Sigil but not on the Sony at all.

Has anyone encountered this before? Is it possible to display Wing/Webdings on eReaders?

Update: I've just tested it in iBooks and the same applies; wing/webdings aren't displaying but the more standard Roman type fonts are...

Jellby

04-07-2011, 08:55 AM

Note the following from the ePUB specification:

Fonts must not provide mappings for Unicode characters that would change the semantics of the text (e.g. mapping the letter "A" to a biohazard symbol)

I don't know if that's the reason why your dingbat fonts don't work, but they should not be used in ePUB, at least not without remapping them to the private Unicode areas.

DesRez

04-07-2011, 09:03 AM

...at least not without remapping them to the private Unicode areas.

Thanks for that info, any idea how I might go about mapping them to Unicode areas?

Apologies for my ignorance on this subject! I've now found references to Unicode Private Use Characters on the web but I've never encountered them before.

pholy

04-07-2011, 09:53 AM

Assuming you had an open license font with wingdings in it, you could use FontForge to re-map the characters into a Private Use area. Then you could embed your new font into your epub file for your book.

And please republish your new font (probably required by the license anyway) so the rest of us can use it too. :)